2014 Holiday Collection #2

Wanda Eifenbaum on Wild Tales

The must-see film of the year in Argentina was Wild Tales. It’s been a long time since an Argentinian film had such success: it broke Argentina’s box office records in its first week, being seen by over 400.000 people. It was well received in Cannes and it has recently been shortlisted for the Oscar Best Foreign Language Film category. Co-produced by Pedro Almodóvar, written and directed by Damián Szifrón, the film shows a collection of short stories where the characters are driven to the very limit of their patience and good will, and end up losing control. These stories are told with a perfect sense of humor that makes the film enjoyable. The public relates to the situations the characters are in, and gets pleasure out of watching what could happen if they just let go and gave free rein to their rage.

The sad – and a bit scary – part is how well our society is portrayed in the film: people so fed up with unjust situations and corruption, so easily irritated by the everyday annoyances who need just a little push to lose control and become violent. Hopefully, as tragedy did in its time, it will create the opportunity to reflect upon our problems.

I missed Sebastiao Salgado’s Genesis exhibition when it was London, so was fortunate to find myself with two free hours in Milan to catch it in a gallery in a former palazzo. Salgado, who is Brazilian, is perhaps best known for his series of pictures of labourers in different parts of the world. Genesis has a similar scale: more than 200 photographs taken over eight years on every continent on the planet, of those parts of the world not transformed by large-scale intervention. Indeed, it could easily be subtitled “Before the Anthropocene.” The photographs are stunning; those of the reindeer herding Nenets in Siberia have a particular energy about them. But the overall effect of the these large black and white prints, seen all together is elegiac, of documenting the Holocene world before we finally obliterate it.